Monthly Archives: January 2005

Our Kind of Polar Bear

A break from the serious: We Minnesotans tend to shake our heads over “polar bear” clubs, where people go swimming on, say, New Year’s Day, usually in climes that by our standards are pretty mild. San Francisco Bay, say. We’re not impressed: in Lake Superior, even in the summer, life expectancy is measured in minutes if you should fall off a boat. In January, no one here goes swimming. Well, »

Ali on the Election

Iraqi blogger Ali talks about tomorrow’s election: Now, and thanks to other humans, not from my area, religion and who don’t even speak my language, I and all Iraqis have the real chance to make the change. Now I OWN my home and I can decide who’s going to run things in it and how and I won’t waste that chance. Tomorrow as I cast my vote, I’ll regain my »

Beware of Hudna

That hudna spirit is breaking out all over Gaza: “Shootout: Hamas rally erupts into violent shootout with rival Fatah faction, wounding more than 25.” As Charles Johnson never fails to exlaim, by all means let’s give these people a state! »

Like a tiger

The 1969 movie “Z” by Costa-Gavras depicts the assassination of a popular Greek politician at a campaign rally and the investigation that followed it. The investigating magistrate serially interrogates buffoonish military officers who describe the assassin jumping out of the crowd, “lithe and fierce, like a tiger.” The identical description provided by each of the officers is a key to the unravelling of the assassination conspiracy in which they were »

Learning from Reagan

It was apparent to me in the course of the 2000 presidential campaign that George W. Bush was a sophisticated student of Ronald Reagan who had learned much more from Reagan than his father had. In his 1988 acceptance speech at the Republican convention, President Bush (41) showed that he seemed to have thought more about how he might distinguish himself from Reagan to his own advantage than how he »

What Bush said

I’ve grown accustomed to Deacon’s deconstruction of the Washington Post’s usual mischief, but he didn’t get around to spoonfeeding me the analysis necessary to understand the damage the Post sought to do to the president’s inaugural address in its “analysis” of the speech. In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, Professor Peter Berkowitz does the honors in an article that is valuable to those who, like me, are incapable »

Behind enemy lines

Of all the human rights organizations with which I am familiar, the one that has the most credibility is Freedom House. Yesterday its Center for Religious Freedom released an 89-page report on Saudi government publications in the United States (click here for the press release, here for the report in PDF). Today’s Washington Times carries an excellent account of the report: “Group cites Saudi hate tracts.” Here are the first »

National Debts, Ours and Theirs

The Skeptical Optimist has created some very nice graphics that put America’s current national debt in perspective, both historically and in proportion to other countries’ debts. I’d steal the graphs, but they’re very pretty and represent a lot of work by the Optimist, so be sure to check them out on his site. While the facts are by no means as bad as they are generally represented, I’d very much »

Terrorist Cell Rolled Up In Mosul

Haider Ajina sends us his translation of an item from the Iraqi newspaper Al Nahrein: A source in the Iraqi police in Mosul announced that the Iraqi security and U.S. forces have arrested an armed terrorist cell leader along with seven of his immediate deputies. Iraqi security forces are not releasing the name of the terrorist leader since he is still being interrogated. This arrest was due to a tip »

Hello, I must be growing

A few readers didn’t get what I was trying to say yesterday when I stated that Vice President Cheney hadn’t “grown in office,” and that, if promoted to Chief Justice, neither would Justice Scalia. For those who have been fortunate enough not to have heard the expression “grow in office” applied to conservatives, let me explain that it is the worst thing a conservative can do. When a conservative is »

Our Return

By the way, we were out of commission for some hours this morning. This was because our domain name registration, which was supposed to be renewed automatically, didn’t go through for some reason. When we realized there was a problem, we wrote our host and they promptly did the registration manually. As I understand it, it usually takes a couple of hours for a site to return, and, the internet »

Mohammed Anticipates Election

Mohammed of Iraq the Model writes: Less than 48 hours left before the people of Iraq experience free decision making for the first time in their country’s modern history. It’s a moment of pure freedom but still surrounded by lots of dangers just like any beautiful rose surrounded by spikes. There is fear from the enemies of freedom who have their weapons already prepared to intimidate us and stop us »

Kennedy’s Disgrace

I don’t believe we’ve commented on Ted Kennedy’s ill-timed speech at Johns Hopkins. Iraqi-American Haider Ajina fills the void: I have read a number of articles in Iraqi newspapers reporting on senator Kennedy »

Iraq Election A Reality

After decades of tyranny, Iraqi expatriates have already begun to elect leaders to draft a new constitution. In the photo below, seventy-year-old exile Mehsin Imgoter weeps after casting his vote at a polling place in Southgate, Michigan. Imgoter explained to a reporter that he was crying because his son, who was killed during the 1990-91 Shiite uprising, was not able to vote with him. Here’s a prediction, by the way, »

The home front

Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only places where Americans are being shot at while trying to keep us safe. It’s also happening in Arizona. The Washington Times reports that 64 Border Patrol agents have been assaulted in the past three months along a 260-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border, “as the U.S. government continues its fight for ‘operational control’ of the region.” Increasingly the attackers, generally smugglers, are using »

Judgment at Karlsruhe

Like the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights has made a seamless transition from an alliance with Communism to an alliance with Islamofascism in the name of the United States Constitution. At the end of November, the CCR filed a 160-page criminal complaint (linked in PDF) with the German federal prosecutor’s office in Karlruhe, Germany against Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, General Ricardo Sanchez, and other American officials responsible »

Why didn’t Bush think of that?

There’s a new contender for the title “dumbest argument against President Bush’s Iraq policy.” Until yesterday, the front-runners were “Bush has no plan” and “we need to involve the allies/U.N” (both submitted by John Kerry). But yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, through a spokesman, stated that we need to employ “political as well as military tools” in Iraq (Madeleine Albright said the same thing yesterday). Now, one can debate »